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OK, I get it.  Participating in NaNoWriMo is supposed to help a writer “get in the zone” and produce a novel—in a month!  Maybe all 302-thousand-plus of you signed up this year will do this.  As Clancy said, “Tell the damned story.”  This is an interesting quote because Clancy wrote books filled with whiz-bang gadgetry—some would call them “military sci-fi” or “militaristic thrillers,” at least the good ones—but it’s inconceivable he ever wrote anything in a month.  That’s the problem with NaNoWriMo.  Maybe it works for vampire romances, fantasies, or other pulp fiction (apologies to authors in those genres, but that’s my opinion), but most fiction works, especially sci-fi thrillers (my subgenre), whether for entertaining readers or literary erudites (they’re almost mutually exclusive groups), require more than a month.  Hell, I spend more than a month copy editing my MS, and that’s not counting the research.

I’ll admit that “research” is easier nowadays (and a terrible misnomer, but there’s nothing between R and D in the vernacular).  The wonderful internet allows me to visit places around the world that I could never visit in person.  That I’ve actually visited many places, especially outside the U.S., that many compatriots haven’t, is largely irrelevant.  That I live in the NYC area and can write about places I’ve experienced here is irrelevant too.  As an example, in Pop Two Antacids and Have Some Java, there’s a short story set mostly in the John Jay College in New York.  I’ve never been there, but I was able to download complete floor plans, including the proposal for new extensions.

The point is: this research takes time.  If you do content editing as you write as I do, that also takes time.  I’m brutal with my prose.  I might write 6k words one day, delete 4k of it and add another 3k the next, and so on.  Sometimes, characters will die, others will be born, and I’m talking about the writing, not the fact that characters suffer violence in my stories.  I write fast, but I could never finish a novel in a month.  No way.  The closest I came was The Midas Bomb—it gushed forth like Texas tea from the spout of the derrick—but I still had to go back and content edit, extensively, in fact.  (Readers will remember the timeline is very compressed in that book.)

Of course, I don’t believe the organizers of NaNoWriMo think you can write a novel in a month either.  They’re thinking that you’ll finish the first draft of the MS.  This is old-fashioned thinking in my opinion.  Drafts are old-fashioned.  As I said, I content edit as I go.  I don’t make drafts.  Or, maybe I should say my first is my last, before I copy edit (not the same as content edit) the MS.  I’m a great believer in word processing software.  Why would you have all those cut-and-paste options if you didn’t use them?  You might as well type that MS on an old typewriter (that’s where the idea of drafts came from, of course, which shows you they’re part of prehistory).

About that zone?  Can you get into it by applying an arbitrary deadline like in NaNoWriMo?  Nope.  Some writers don’t ever get into it.  They plod along and still write good stuff.  Getting into the zone isn’t something you need to do.  Keeping your writing fresh is.  My father, the artist, often plodded along on a painting, but he would think more than once about what his next brush strokes would be.  In oil painting, the more you rework the scene, the muddier the colors become—it loses its freshness.  There’s something to be said about doing that in your writing.  You need to think about the words you’ll be writing and not rework scenes and passages too much.

The above is not quite like being in the zone.  That’s almost a trance-like state where I often find my characters doing things I never imagined (at least consciously) that they’d be doing.  The words flow as if from a brain enema.  You can’t keep it up for long—maybe an hour or so per day.  And the more I’m in the zone, the more I have to go back and content edit.  Being in the zone is not a logical process—it’s a creative process.  It’s not something I can control either.  I tend to skip over things too.  I might write, “X went to Y and found his next dead body,” meaning that I haven’t decided yet what to call X and where or what Y actually is.

I suppose I could participate in NaNoWriMo that way, but I wouldn’t be happy about it.  My physicist’s training pounds on me to go back and add the logic, the organization.  Cut and paste play powerful roles in my novel writing.  I suppose this work style is partly due to my need to ensure the story hangs together, to make it the best I can.  I’m a good example of an author that’s never satisfied with his work, but I reach a point where I sign off on the story because I know that adding more brush strokes will only muddy it.

Each author has to find his own writing technique.  NaNoWriMo pushes one, with maybe a few variations.  That technique isn’t for me.  With fourteen books, I’ve discovered one that works.  Maybe NaNoWriMo will help you discover yours.  In any case, it’s something you have to do on your own.  It’s like buying a shirt or a blouse.  If you’re not comfortable with it, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.  That doesn’t mean you can’t try it on for size, but caveat emptor.

In libris libertas….

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